Over 4,000 participants at more than 225 events around the world participated in Art+Feminism’s fourth annual Wikipedia Edit-a-thon, which took place across the month of March around Women’s History Month. This global effort created or improved over 6,000 articles on Wikipedia, almost twice the output of the 2016 events. In total, since 2014, over 8,000 people at more than 500 events around the world have participated in Art+Feminism’s Edit-a-thons, resulting in the creation and improvement of nearly 11,000 articles on Wikipedia. Some notable examples: Dorrit Black, Sara VanDerBeek, Joan Semmel, Judy Chicago, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Lucy Lippard, Emily Stackhouse, and Mary Course. These events are primarily held in the month of March, though groups hold events throughout the year under our banner. Over the past our years our events have experienced steady growth, from 31 to 75 to 179 to 228 events a year. We continue to be inspired by all the dedicated folks who make room in their busy schedules to share skills and improve a collectively held resource like Wikipedia.

As we say in our statement of beliefs, "The steps to encouraging a woman to be heard and to be visible in her community are fraught with resistance and ridicule. Beginning this project, we knew that our role would not only be to empower women - we use the most expansive definition of that term - to edit online but to stand with them as they are challenged by those who do not see value in their voice and who do not see value in them. Art + Feminism is about making Wikipedia better, as a tool for open access to reliable information, but it doesn’t end there. It’s about dismantling systems of thought that ignore the presence and input of women in the room and diminish or erase entirely their place in history."

As we enter our fifth year of organizing we will continue to employ technology (like Slack) and provide supplemental training to make our organizers more independent; to continue the strategic outreach making the project more inclusive; and to continue to refine our materials (training, promotion, organization) to reflect the breadth and depth of our community. And we are beginning the process of becoming a non-profit (see Strategic Report for more information)

During our March 2017 campaign, 228 events took place in 37 countries on all six inhabited continents and online. At least 4,105 participants created or improved 6031 pages, and uploaded 1587 images to Wikimedia Commons. Detailed outcomes from 2017 are here. Our metrics goals for 2018 are as follows. These predictions are based off of our growth models.

Current growth models for Art+Feminism events, participants, and articles created, based off of 4 years of data. Year 0 is 2014.

Global Metrics

4500 participants

1200 newly registered users

10,000 content pages created or improved, across all Wikimedia projects.

Art+Feminism events have taken place on all inhabited continents. These events have created or improved articles on a number of different language Wikipedias: Arabic, Finnish, French, German, Hindi, Thai, Odia, Spanish, Nepalese, Esperanto, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Turkish, Swedish, Catalan, Welsh, Dutch and more. The Art+Feminism community includes artists, art workers, activists, librarians, scholars, students, and Wikipedians. As our event archive shows, we have gained support from diverse communities, from activist spaces like Interference Archive, to major universities like University of Pittsburgh and MIT, to public libraries like Darien Public Library and National Library of Wales, as well as cultural institutions like Tate, London, and more. We've also seen support from within the Wikimedia community, from organizations like Wikimedia NYC and Women in Red, for example. Our events add a lot of content to the Commons and have led to spin off campaigns like AfroCrowd, For the Record, and more.

Human Resources: the hundreds of individuals who have planned and executed Art+Feminism events nationally and internationally; these include seasoned wikipedians, librarians, professors, artists, organizers, and others.

Technology & Workflow: we have a proven workflow with a CRM, several project management tools to handle our expected growth, and an established Slack community to collaborate horizontally.

Program and Events Dashboard: After a successful Dashboard campaign, we have a community of organizers who know how to use the tool, and the Dashboard team fixed the bugs we reported, and incorporated some of our most urgent feature requests.

Institutional Relationships: We have strong relationships with important cultural organizations and post-secondary institutions across the globe, such as The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles Country Museum of Art; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Fondation Galeries Lafayette, Paris; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Concordia University, Montreal; University of British Columbia, Vancouver; and many more.

Wikimedia Community Partners and Allies: We have built strong relationships with existing initiates, and helped catalyze a number of other groups and initiatives with which we continue to work. These include: Wikimedia Chapters and User Groups (Austria, Canada, Cascadia, Chile, DC, France, Germany, Ghana, Mexico, NYC, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan), and Wikimedia User Groups and projects (AfroCrowd, For the Record, Wiki Loves Pride, Women in Red).

The phenomenal success of Art+Feminism has been wonderful. However, it has created an incredible amount of work for the lead co-organizers to juggle with their already busy professional schedules. We've grown and done more with our Program Coordinator, but we've added more things - additional training, ancillary programs like the Call to Action art commission and the podcast - and so burnout is still a risk for all, especially with a grant cap that doesn't allow for much larger compensation.

Friendly Space Incidents

Although Art+Feminism has elicited an overall positive response the project has received some unwanted attention. For example, each year there have been reports of harassment at events; there have been incidents where individuals have not followed our materials and this has resulted in several articles for deletion; and the lead co-organizers have been targeted by active editors who don't like the way we do things. We have also encountered harassment and microaggressions at Wikimedia conferences. The labor of recording and reporting these incidents as well as providing sustained guidance to the foundation and community members also contributes to the above risk of burnout.

Growth

The project has exhibited steady, and at times exponential growth, as you can see in our growth model. This growth could become a burden. Alternatively, it is unclear when/how it will taper off. Many of the strategies listed above are meant to address this risk and make the project more sustainable.

McKensie has exceeded the original asks of her role as a project coordinator and project manager. In addition to the project coordination scope, she has also used the funding for her role to hone in on operational strategy, the application of anti-oppressive frameworks for community outreach in Black and brown communities and LGBTQ communities, and digital outreach.

As part of our strategic plan, we seek to build operational capacity as we transition to becoming an independent 501c3 organization. That necessitates certain expenses that were not in any of our previous budgets, as they were either not necessary, or were provided by WMDC as our fiscal sponsor. One of these costs is a 5% overhead fee to our new fiscal sponsor Qubit. Typical Fiscal sponsor fees range from 7% to 10%, so 5% represents a significant discount. We recognize that our accounting requirements are beyond the capacity of already busy Wikimedia groups, and do not wish to strain movement capacity any further. We feel that this is a small cost to bear in order to increase our efficiency and prepare us for becoming an independent 501c3 organization.

As we forecast continued growth, increased organizational costs, and a budget cap of $100,000 USD, we are planning to have all node events seeking funding to apply for rapid grants. In addition to offloading some of the grant budget, and accounting responsibility, it also promotes overall A+F community and Wikimedia movement capacity by training and empowering dozens of organizers to apply for their own funding.

Rapid Grants review has a rolling deadline; we will be articulating a priority deadline of January 15th, and a final deadline of February 15th for the submission of these grants. We will work with the Rapid Grants team to establish a template for these grants. We will offer a "how to apply for an AF rapid grant" webinar for our organizers in early January, which we will record for reuse.

We will advise our nodes to apply for funding with the following structure: New nodes can apply for up to $100 in food/incidentals, and up to $150 for childcare (max established by $25hr x 6hours). This is based on $5 in food costs per person for an assumed average attendance of about 20 people, which is the median number for most new events. Events 5 hours or longer may increase food costs to $8 per person, or $160 total. We will encourage the Rapid Grants team to consider well articulated exceptions to these new node guidelines.

Existing nodes can apply for funding by projecting their attendance for this year based off of the headcount from last year x 1.25, which seems to be the average growth. Allocate $5 per person for events 4.5 hours and shorter, or $8 per person for events longer than 5 hours. Childcare funding guidelines are the same, scaled per event size (approximately one caregiver per 50 attendees).

Certain existing nodes will be asked to serve as the regional funding hub, in order to coordinate and centralize some of these smaller funding requests. Thus we will aim to have one request for the 6 small to medium sized events in Philadelphia, for example, or one request for the 3 events in the Ohio/Indiana/Michigan region.

All nodes can apply for well articulated programming plans that require additional funds. Priority will go to existing nodes, or new nodes with demonstrated organizational capacity.